The Girls of Skylark Lane
by Robin Benway
Pub DateOct 01 2024
HarperCollins Children's Books |HarperCollins
Children's Fiction| Middle Grade| Sports



Netgalley and Harper Collins Children's Books provided me with a copy of The Girls of Skylark Lane for review:


Even though Aggie and Jac are twins, they haven't felt the same lately. Jac is excited about their move to Los Angeles and the opportunity to appear cool and mysterious, but Aggie is worried her new locker won't open, that Jac could make new friends without her, and that her friends from home will move on.



The first day at school ends with Aggie being invited to join the neighborhood softball team, despite the fact that Jac's interest might be more influenced by the captain's older brother... 



As Aggie learns each girl has her own problems, she becomes excited at the prospect of forming strong friendships. Will Jac and Aggie's sisterhood survive as they grow into different people? .Life throws the biggest curveball of all: growing up.



I give The Girls of Skylark Lane five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

A story of friendship forged between a group of girls playing softball together afterschool and on weekends. As well as a story about twin sisters navigating their growing differences. You will love the characters!

The Girls of Skylark Lane was a really sweet middle grade novel following twins Jac and Aggie as the adjust to their move to LA. They make friends with a fun group and join their softball team. I appreciated a lot of the themes explored in this book and think it would be a great read for the middle school aged crowd (and above!).

Thank you to #NetGalley, Robin Benway, and the publisher of the book for the eARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

Aggie and Jac may be twins, but they could not be more different. Especially recently. Jac is excited as her family moves to LA, but Aggie is not. She's worried about making new friends and Jac going off without her. Jac feels a little better though when they are invited to join their neighborhood softball team. Even is Aggie is doing it just to attract the attention of a fellow player's older brother.
Will the sisters maintain their friendship/sisterhood or will they continue to grow apart?

A great middle great read! It discusses tough topics like growing up and learning how to maintain and balance friendships. I liked both Aggie and Jac for their individual interests and how they handle different interactions and challenges. I will be recommending this book to my students.

Thank you Netgalley and HarperCollins Children's Books for providing me with an eARC of The Girls of Skylark Lane. A sweet story of starting middle school, puberty, and all the things that happen when you are 12 years old. Twins, Aggie and Jac (their shortened names, not going to spoil their real names) move from San Francisco to Los Angeles with their Dads. Starting a new grade is hard enough but add in a new school, names that are "weird" and the fact that they are starting to drift apart makes the whole thing harder. Aggie meets Tink, who talks like no other. Turns out Tink is a neighbor of theirs and asks them to come over after school. When the girls go over that afternoon they meet 6 other girls their age that play softball together in the street. The girls learn what it means to be a team, support one another through the twists and turns of being a tween. They show that through the "new" aspects that are happening in life, being a team truly makes the dream work!

I received a free eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this mostly because I’m just on a middle grade kick lately, and the blurb sucked me in with mention of The Babysitter’s Club, which was my all-time favorite series as a kid. This definitely has BSC vibes - a group of friends from all different types of families and backgrounds, and the story is mostly just about them…living life. Things pick up a bit near the end, and I had issues with some of the pacing of that part, but mostly it’s quite lovely and sweet.

Our narrators are twins Aggie and Jac, who go by their nicknames because they have embarrassingly long real names (Agapanthus and Jacaranda) thanks to their dads’ love of plants. They’re being raised by 2 dads, and have just moved from San Francisco to a new neighborhood closer to Los Angeles. Aggie and Jac trade off narration duties as we watch them navigate starting a new school, finding new friends, and going through all of the expected growing pains. Their neighbor Tink invites the twins to join her baseball team, which is really just a loose collection of other girls from the neighborhood who for one reason or another aren’t part of organized teams. As Jac points out frequently, they hardly ever practice - someone’s life drama gets in the way first. But the team (or at least the notion of a team) is what bonds them together.

It’s pretty common in these sort of books (and in…life) for a pair of best friends to suddenly grow apart in middle school. It’s really one of the few middle school problems that transcends gender! All best friends, no matter how they identify, usually have some kind of drama once they hit the 11-12 range, and it’s usually because someone is maturing more quickly. But in this case it’s even harder because Aggie and Jac aren’t just best friends, they’re twins. Aggie feels like Jac is maturing faster than her and somehow leaving her behind (she wants to go to Sephora for their birthday shopping trip, while Aggie still wants to go to Build a Bear). But Aggie doesn’t really like any of that stuff yet, even though she feels like maybe she *should*. Jac was sort of a harder nut to crack, which is weird because she narrates half of the chapters, but for some reason this felt to me more like Aggie’s book than hers. There’s a subplot where Jac’s maybe being bullied by 8th graders, but we don’t really see much of it from her perspective - just Aggie witnessing it. I feel like we were more in Aggie’s head than Jac’s, for some reason.

Overall though, this is really sweet, without being treacly. Middle grade books are so much better than when I was this age! (No shade to the babysitters, but really, if you weren’t into them or outgrew them, there wasn’t much else out there)

Far From the Tree by Robin Benway got me back into reading (and loving) YA, so when I saw she had a middle grade book coming out, I had to get my hands on it!

This was delightful. Loved the twins, and their new friends, and the rag tag softball team. Loved the diversity and representation. Loved that all their friends were going through changes and hardships and real life problems of their own, but they had each other to get through it. Loved that the adults were messy and complicated and realistic.

Gave me the feels, made me laugh and cry, and I can't wait to share this one with my own middle grade reading daughters.

Recommended for ages 10+.

The Girls of Skylark Lane is a fun middle grade book that touches on some deeper topics, but leaves the reader feeling encouraged and happy by the end.

Aggie and Jac are a pair of identical twins who have just moved to Southern California from the Bay Area with their dads and their (coincidentally-named) pet rat, Jack. They start a new school, make new friends, and deal with middle school struggles like having a crush and starting your period unexpectedly. The neighborhood baseball "team" is a nice device to bring a bunch of girls together, but they spend most of their time dealing with parental issues, sibling issues, etc.

The third act conflict is a bit scary, but handled gently for all readers! I love the "found family" trope, and this book did it well.

Such a wonderful book! I think Jack the rat was definitely a favorite of mine. I could not put the book down once I began reading it. Really cannot wait for it to be released. I will recommend it to everyone I know!

I’m a huge Robin Benway fan and was thrilled with a story with middle school as its core. I also appreciate a strong author offering a book revolving around softball since I get quite a few requests with only a handful of books. Twins finding their own voice was a powerful theme and will resonate with middle school readers.

4.5 stars rounded up. My daughter and I enjoyed this middle grade novel about celebrating your differences and being unique.

Aggie and Jac are twin sisters who recently moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco the week before school started. Even though they are identical twins, they have very different personalities. Despite this, the girls join a recreational softball team together and make several friends. The book highlights how the kids on the softball team are all quite different, but form an accepting and inclusive group regardless. As an adult, I also appreciated the diversity featuring a gay couple, as the girls have 2 dads.

I have adored Robin Benway for years now. Her writing about middle grade is such a good depiction. This book is a great book for middle grade girls who are going through changes and trying to figure out where they fit in.
I loved Aggie and Jac, and their new friend Tink and how she just welcomed them in with open arms. I loved the different family dynamics and how they all really supported each other.
I liked how we see how different Jac and Aggie are. One is neater and one is messier. But they both like things a certain way. I am more like Aggie, change is hard and like to hang onto past things that mean a lot to me. We see that even though they are twins they are allowed to be their own person. I liked how Benway references to their past and how Aggie is dealing with these changes and sometimes wishes she could be little again because being like her sister was easier then. This is something that so many people can relate to. Change is hard, no matter the situation and we all are going to face it sometime.
This group of friends was amazing! They are all so different and going through different things but they find ways to help support each other and be there for each other. They also find ways to just have fun, while they are playing on their softball "team".
I liked the look at periods also and how that can be a hard change for middle grade girls to go through.
The way the community comes together at the end was wonderful.

A book that will definitely be added to my personal collection and the library's collection.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!

This was a short and sweet book, but I don't really have much to say.

Benway's Far From the Tree is one of my all time favs, so I went into this having a lot of confidence the author would nail the family elements, which she did. Any scene with Aggie, Jac, and their dads was my favorite, whether it was all of them or one of the girls with one of the dads. The dynamic felt so naturally loving and dorky; I just adored them.

The friendship group was really good, too. The friends had their own quirks and problems they deal with, and I loved how much they lifted and supported each other. It was kind of weird that they used lingo I never used at their age, such as one of them calling another a capitalist (I didn't even know what capitalism was til I was a high school junior!). But then it was obvious these kids live in a modern internet age, so them learning/using certain words/phrases is just a given. I applaud Benway for being able to replicate that in her characters so well.

The only reason I didn't like this much more is because I genuinely felt too old to relate? Plus, I didn't have much trouble with change like Aggie and Jac do when I was young, so there's that, too.

All in all, I would still recommend this for this book's targeted age group, for the middle schoolers who would relate more to Aggie and Jac than I could.